Two sidecars.
He looked down at his hands. One was cut across the knuckles. They thought for him, the hands, darting out to twitch the rag away, finding the brake, the gearshift lever, as his thinking feet began their slow dance over the starter, accelerator, clutch. The engine raced and coughed and raced again cleanly, and the big car backed out of the ditch. The low rasp of a new tire against a crumpled fender rose to a moan and died and rasped again as he backed and stopped and shifted, and then he swept away toward the city, the tortured fender screaming. Henley didn’t care about that now. He rode inside the car, deep inside himself, watching his reflexive driving, looking at an insane mental flash of himself choosing melodramatically between Caroline and a sidecar, taking the sidecar. He felt sick and drove very fast.
There was a man sweeping the sidewalk in front of DeMaio’s when Henley pulled up. “Lousy,” said Henley when the man asked how he was. “You a bartender?”
“I think so,” said the man, watching Henley get out of the car. He thought it was a shame to use expensive clothes like that. “But the boss don’t yet, so I’m a porter. Why?”
“Can you mix a sidecar?”
“We ain’t open yet.” Henley walked into the place and said, “If the doors are open the joint is open. Mix me a sidecar. Two sidecars.” The man began to speak, then left his jaw dropped as he saw the bill Henley tossed on the counter. He went behind the bar.
Henley hung by his triceps for two and a half hours then, drinking sidecars. The only thing in his mind was “Why didn’t Caroline tell me who he was? Maybe I wouldn’t care then. Maybe I wouldn’t be sore.” It was in his mind so long because he said it over and over again. He was saying it half aloud when someone stopped beside him for a beer. Henley screwed his gaze over to the man. He knew him. Ruskin. “Hi.”
Ruskin jumped. “Good God. Henley.” His voice was deep and smooth. He was young and tall and clean. His beer came and he didn’t look at it. He was seeing Henley, the way he looked, his wrinkled clothes, his two-day beard. Henley laughed in two syllables that hurt his throat. He struck Ruskin’s beer; it slid two feet down the bar and turned over. “The ge’mun’s with me,” he told the barkeep who wiped it up. “Two sidecars.”
“You’re in a sweet shape, Henley.”
“Got a right to be. What’s South America like, Ruskin?” Ruskin would know. He had a station at Bahia. Was going back in a day or so.
Ruskin raised his eyebrows. “Big. What part?”
“Dunno,” said Henley flatly. He drank, and then words spilled out. “Wife’s going there. She sent me a note. Polite as hell.” His voice turned falsetto. “I’m sorry but it just won’t work. Don’t hold it against anyone—me, the man I’m going away with, or even yourself. You can’t help being what you are. This shouldn’t bother you much; your girlfriends won’t let you be lonely. I’m going to South America. Maybe I’ll write someday.”
“That the note?” asked Ruskin, and smiled. “You always did cut a lot of corners with her, Henley. Talked a lot about it. You know, I often used to wonder if you talked like that to Car—your wife. Seems you did. Women don’t like that, Henley. Didn’t you know?”
Henley started on Ruskin’s drink. He wasn’t listening. He was trying to think. When the sound of Ruskin’s voice stopped, he said, “Yes, I’ll kill the dirty—” The disgust on Ruskin’s face reached him vaguely. “Don’t like me, do you?” he spat. “Okay, okay. Beat it then. Go on away. Don’t like me, don’t have to stick around. Plenty other—”
Ruskin’s face was pale. “I never realized what a heel you are,” he half-whispered. “How in God’s name could a woman like Caroline ever—” His taut arms relaxed and his hands fell against his thighs. He walked out. Henley glared after him. When he was gone he called, “Hey! Have another—” Then he shrugged and finished the drink.
He put his weight on his elbows and hung his head and rocked a bit. “Damn boy scout,” he muttered. He was irritated because Ruskin reminded him of Caroline. They were both tall, clean-looking like that. When he thought of them together, it was no trouble at all for him to realize who was taking his wife away to South America. He said “Gha!” with an intake of breath, choked on his saliva. He stood on the brass rail, pounded the counter furiously. “That’s the guy, that Ruskin! He’s the one, the—” He began to cough. The bartender reached over, held him by the armpits, steadied him down to the floor.
“Who’s who?” asked the bartender soothingly.
“That guy was drinking with me. Him and my wife—you see? You get that?”
“Well?” The bartender’s cheeks were tight, smiling inside. He kept holding Henley up.
Henley felt something die, down deep. It hurt. He should kill Ruskin. He should kill them both. He had the guts. He looked at the bartender for a long time and then saw him. He drew a deep breath.
“Two sidecars,” he said.
Microcosmic God
HERE IS A STORY about a man who had too much power, and a man who took too much, but don’t worry; I’m not going political on you. The man who had the power was named James Kidder, and the other was his banker.
Kidder was quite a guy. He was a scientist and he lived on a small island off the New England coast all by himself. He wasn’t the dwarfed little gnome of a mad scientist you read about. His hobby wasn’t personal profit, and he wasn’t a megalomaniac with a Russian name and no scruples. He wasn’t insidious, and he wasn’t even particularly subversive. He kept his hair cut and his nails clean and lived and thought like a reasonable human being. He was slightly on the baby-faced side; he was inclined to be a hermit; he was short and plump and—brilliant. His specialty was biochemistry, and he was always called Mr. Kidder. Not “Dr.” Not “Professor.” Just Mr. Kidder.
He was an odd sort of apple and always had been. He had never graduated from any college or university because he found them too slow for him, and too rigid in their approach to education. He could not get used to the idea that perhaps his professors knew what they were talking about. That went for his texts, too. He was always asking questions, and didn’t mind very much when they were embarrassing. He considered Gregor Mendel a bungling liar, Darwin an amusing philosopher, and Luther Burbank a sensationalist. He never opened his mouth without its leaving his victim feeling breathless. If he was talking to someone who had knowledge, he went in there and got it, leaving his victim breathless. If he was talking to someone whose knowledge was already in his possession, he only asked repeatedly, “How do you know?” His most delectable pleasure was taken in cutting a fanatical eugenicist into conversational ribbons. So people left him alone and never, never asked him to tea. He was polite, but not politic.
He had a little money of his own, and with it he leased the island and built himself a laboratory. Now I’ve mentioned that he was a biochemist. But being what he was, he couldn’t keep his nose in his own field. It wasn’t too remarkable when he made an intellectual excursion wide enough to perfect a method of crystallizing Vitamin B1 profitably by the ton—if anyone wanted it by the ton. He got a lot of money for it. He bought his island outright and put eight hundred men to work on an acre and a half of his ground, adding to his laboratory and building equipment. He got messing around with sisal fiber, found out how to fuse it, and boomed the banana industry by producing a practically unbreakable cord from the stuff.
You remember the popularizing demonstration he put on at Niagara, don’t you? That business of running a line of the new cord from bank to bank over the rapids and suspending a ten-ton truck from the middle of it by razor edges resting on the cord? That’s why ships now moor themselves with what looks like heaving line, no thicker than a lead pencil, that can be coiled on reels like a garden hose. Kidder made cigarette money out of that, too. He went out and bought himself a cyclotron with part of it.
After that money wasn’t money any more. It was large numbers in little books. Kidder used little amounts of it to have food and equipment sent out to him, but after a while
that stopped, too. His bank dispatched a messenger by seaplane to find out if Kidder was still alive. The man returned two days later in a mused state, having been amazed something awesome at the things he’d seen out there. Kidder was alive, all right, and he was turning out a surplus of good food in an astonishingly simplified synthetic form. The bank wrote immediately and wanted to know if Mr. Kidder, in his own interest, was willing to release the secret of his dirtless farming. Kidder replied that he would be glad to, and enclosed the formulas. In a P.S. he said that he hadn’t sent the information ashore because he hadn’t realized anyone would be interested. That from a man who was responsible for the greatest sociological change in the second half of the twentieth century—factory farming. It made him richer; I mean it made his bank richer. He didn’t give a rap.
But Kidder didn’t really get started until about eight months after the messenger’s visit. For a biochemist who couldn’t even be called “Dr.” he did pretty well. Here is a partial list of the things that he turned out:
A commercially feasible plan for making an aluminum alloy stronger than the best steel so that it could be used as a structural metal.
An exhibition gadget he called a light pump, which worked on the theory that light is a form of matter and therefore subject to physical and electromagnetic laws. Seal a room with a single light source, beam a cylindrical vibratory magnetic field to it from the pump, and the light will be led down it. Now pass the light through Kidder’s “lens”—a ring which perpetuates an electric field along the lines of a high-speed iris-type camera shutter. Below this is the heart of the light pump—a ninety-eight percent efficient light absorber, crystalline, which, in a sense, loses the light in its internal facets. The effect of darkening the room with this apparatus is slight but measurable. Pardon my layman’s language, but that’s the general idea.
Synthetic chlorophyll—by the barrel.
An airplane propeller efficient at eight times sonic speed.
A cheap goo you brush on over old paint, let harden, and then peel off like strips of cloth. The old paint comes with it. That one made friends fast.
A self-sustaining atomic disintegration of uranium’s isotope 238, which is two hundred times as plentiful as the old stand-by, U-235.
That will do for the present. If I may repeat myself: for a biochemist who couldn’t even be called “Dr.,” he did pretty well.
Kidder was apparently unconscious of the fact that he held power enough on his little island to become master of the world. His mind simply didn’t run to things like that. As long as he was left alone with his experiments, he was well content to leave the rest of the world to its own clumsy and primitive devices. He couldn’t be reached except by a radiophone of his own design, and its only counterpart was locked in a vault of his Boston bank. Only one man could operate it. The extraordinarily sensitive transmitter would respond only to Conant’s own body vibrations. Kidder had instructed Conant that he was not to be disturbed except by messages of the greatest moment. His ideas and patents, what Conant could pry out of him, were released under pseudonyms known only to Conant—Kidder didn’t care.
The result, of course, was an infiltration of the most astonishing advancements since the dawn of civilization. The nation profited—the world profited. But most of all, the bank profited. It began to get a little oversize. It began getting its fingers into other pies. It grew more fingers and had to bake more figurative pies. Before many years had passed, it was so big that, using Kidder’s many weapons, it almost matched Kidder in power.
Almost.
Now stand by while I squelch those fellows in the lower left-hand corner who’ve been saying all this while that Kidder’s slightly improbable; that no man could ever perfect himself in so many ways in so many sciences.
Well, you’re right. Kidder was a genius—granted. But his genius was not creative. He was, to the core, a student. He applied what he knew, what he saw, and what he was taught. When first he began working in his new laboratory on his island he reasoned something like this:
“Everything I know is what I have been taught by the sayings and writings of people who have studied the sayings and writings of people who have—and so on. Once in a while someone stumbles on something new and he or someone cleverer uses the idea and disseminates it. But for each one that finds something really new, a couple of million gather and pass on information that is already current. I’d know more if I could get the jump on evolutionary trends. It takes too long to wait for the accidents that increase man’s knowledge—my knowledge. If I had ambition enough now to figure out how to travel ahead in time, I could skim the surface of the future and just dip down when I saw something interesting. But time isn’t that way. It can’t be left behind or tossed ahead. What else is left?
“Well, there’s the proposition of speeding intellectual evolution so that I can observe what it cooks up. That seems a bit inefficient. It would involve more labor to discipline human minds to that extent than it would to simply apply myself along those lines. But I can’t apply myself that way. No one man can.
“I’m licked. I can’t speed myself up, and I can’t speed other men’s minds up. Isn’t there an alternative? There must be—somewhere, somehow, there’s got to be an answer.”
So it was on this, and not on eugenics, or light pumps, or botany, or atomic physics, that James Kidder applied himself. For a practical man, he found the problem slightly on the metaphysical side; but he attacked it with typical thoroughness, using his own peculiar brand of logic. Day after day he wandered over the island, throwing shells impotently at sea gulls and swearing richly. Then came a time when he sat indoors and brooded. And only then did he get feverishly to work.
He worked in his own field, biochemistry, and concentrated mainly on two things—genetics and animal metabolism. He learned, and filed away in his insatiable mind, many things having nothing to do with the problem in hand, and very little of what he wanted. But he piled that little on what little he knew or guessed, and in time had quite a collection of known factors to work with. His approach was characteristically unorthodox. He did things on the order of multiplying apples by pears, and balancing equations by adding log to one side and ∞ to the other. He made mistakes, but only one of a kind, and later, only one of a species. He spent so many hours at his microscope that he had to quit work for two days to get rid of a hallucination that his heart was pumping his own blood through the mike. He did nothing by trial and error because he disapproved of the method as sloppy.
And he got results. He was lucky to begin with, and even luckier when he formularized the law of probability and reduced it to such low terms that he knew almost to the item what experiments not to try. When the cloudy, viscous semifluid on the watch glass began to move of itself he knew he was on the right track. When it began to seek food on its own he began to be excited. When it divided and, in a few hours, redivided, and each part grew and divided again, he was triumphant, for he had created life.
He nursed his brainchildren and sweated and strained over them, and he designed baths of various vibrations for them, and inoculated and dosed and sprayed them. Each move he made taught him the next. And out of his tanks and tubes and incubators came amoebalike creatures, and then ciliated animalcules, and more and more rapidly he produced animals with eye spots, nerve cysts, and then—victory of victories—a real blastopod, possessed of many cells instead of one. More slowly he developed a gastropod, but once he had it, it was not too difficult for him to give it organs, each with a specified function, each inheritable.
Then came cultured mollusklike things, and creatures with more and more perfected gills. The day that a nondescript thing wriggled up an inclined board out of a tank, threw flaps over its gills and feebly breathed air, Kidder quit work and went to the other end of the island and got disgustingly drunk. Hangover and all, he was soon back in the lab, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, tearing into his problem.
He turned into a scientific byway and ran d
own his other great triumph—accelerated metabolism. He extracted and refined the stimulating factors in alcohol, coca, heroin, and Mother Nature’s prize dope runner, cannabis indica. Like the scientist who, in analyzing the various clotting agents for blood treatments, found that oxalic acid and oxalic acid alone was the active factor, Kidder isolated the accelerators and decelerators, the stimulants and soporifics, in every substance that ever undermined a man’s morality and/or caused a “noble experiment.” In the process he found one thing he needed badly—a colorless elixir that made sleep the unnecessary and avoidable waster of time it should be. Then and there he went on a twenty-four-hour shift.
He artificially synthesized the substances he had isolated, and in doing so sloughed away a great many useless components. He pursued the subject along the lines of radiations and vibrations. He discovered something in the longer reds which, when projected through a vessel full of air vibrating in the supersonics, and then polarized, speeded up the heartbeat of small animals twenty to one. They ate twenty times as much, grew twenty times as fast, and—died twenty times sooner than they should have.
Microcosmic God Page 18